A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989) New Line/Horror RT: 90 minutes Rated R (language, graphic violence and gore, frightening images, brief nudity, sexual content) Director: Stephen Hopkins Screenplay: Leslie Bohem Music: Jay Ferguson Cinematography: Peter Levy Release date: August 11, 1989 (US) Cast: Robert Englund, Lisa Wilcox, Kelly Jo Minter, Danny Hassel, Erika Anderson, Nick Mele, Joe Seely, Valorie Armstrong, Burr DeBenning, Clarence Felder, Beatrice Boepple. Box Office: $22.1 million (US)
Rating: **
I was really hoping that A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child would be good. Two weeks earlier, I experienced the crushing disappointment that was Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan and really needed a boost to restore my faith in long-running horror franchises.
As usual, I was there opening day. It was a rainy Friday in August, the kind of day that reminds you summer is coming to an end and school will soon be back in session. I was supposed to attend a midnight show with a friend, but he bailed on me that morning, so I was left to arrange a last-minute trip to the Lawrence Park Theater for the 1pm show. As a full-fledged fan of the slasher genre, I absolutely had to see The Dream Child on its first day in theaters to avoid the risk of some jackass dropping plot spoilers before I got a chance to see it. Again, I really hoped for a solid entry in my second favorite horror franchise. Alas, it wasn’t to be.
Despite Alice Johnson (Wilcox) returning as the heroine, The Dream Child is a real bore. It has a decidedly darker tone than any of its predecessors and takes itself far too seriously by dealing with serious subjects like teen pregnancy, drunk driving and anorexia/bulimia. Simply put, The Dream Child takes a wrong turn.
It’s been a year since the events of the previous installment and Alice is about to graduate high school. She and Dan (Hassel) are now a couple and have a new set of friends- aspiring model Greta (Anderson), champion swimmer Yvonne (Minter, The Principal) and comic book geek Mark (Seely). Alice still experiences terrifying nightmares and not always while she’s asleep. The summer takes a turn for the worse when Dan is killed in a car accident while on his way to calm a panicky Alice. His death is blamed on drunk driving, but Alice knows damn well that Freddy is responsible. Then she gets the earth-shaking news that she’s pregnant with his child. Things get freakier from this point.
Alice receives a visit from a mysterious boy at the hospital even though there aren’t any children on her floor. There isn’t even a children’s ward. The nightmares continue with a vengeance as her friends start dying off. Alice finally realizes that Freddy is getting to her friends by way of her unborn son’s dreams. There’s a way to stop Freddy, but first she needs to find the ghost of his mother Amanda Krueger, the mysterious nun from Dream Warriors, trapped somewhere in a tower at an abandoned lunatic asylum. She holds the key to ending Freddy’s reign of terror.
Englund and Wilcox turn in good performances in their respective roles, but the true saving grace of The Dream Child are the visuals. The dream sequences have more of a Gothic tone this time around. One of them borrows heavily from the drawings of Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher. Another seems inspired by the 1988 film Paperhouse and the music video for “Take on Me” by A-ha. It’s during these scenes that The Dream Child finds its stride. It’s too bad that the narrative comes up short which shouldn’t surprise anyone given who directs. Stephen Hopkins (Predator 2) isn’t known for strong narratives. He has an eye for visuals, but that’s about it.
The new characters in The Dream Child aren’t all that interesting. In fact, some of them are downright annoying. Take Greta’s mother, the stage mom from Hell. She’s clearly the cause of her daughter’s issues with food and body image. I wanted to see Freddy get this bitch. Instead, he force-feeds Greta to death in a very nauseating scene. Yvonne is an okay albeit unremarkable character. However, I happen to like Minter as an actress, so I’m prepared to cut her some slack. It’s not her fault that her character (as well as several others) is underwritten and underdeveloped. That falls squarely on the shoulders of writer Leslie Bohem.
Truth be known, there’s a good story buried somewhere in The Dream Child. I didn’t hate the premise at all. It’s the execution of said premise that derails the movie. In the vernacular of my generation, it’s so lame! You might want to watch it with the sound turned down and the heavy metal cranked up. It probably plays much better as an extended music video.
